Aftermath

by Nir Rosen

  Attacks on Sunni mosques were evidence of sectarian hatred on both sides, he told me, but he regretted this. “We have doctrinal differences with them, but we have an enemy, Israel. I am speaking as a Muslim: if sectarian war happens here, like in Iraq, then Palestinians would get involved. In the end, we are Sunnis.”

  I asked him which jihadist ideologues were most influential in the camp. He named Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a Saudi called Sheikh Khalid Rashid, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but “Sheikh Osama” bin Laden was the most important, “because he renewed jihad in our century.” Although many “terrorism experts” in the West were excited that several prominent jihad ideologues had recanted, Abu Ghassan confirmed my view that most people knew they had been forced to change their mind.

  He had sold his Glock pistol recently. Weapons prices in the camp were related to the prices in Syria and Iraq, he told me. He now had a CZ75 pistol, which cost $1,500. As we spoke, we heard shots fired outside. He told his son to come in the house.

  Back in Tripoli, Musbah al-Ahdab publicly stated that if Hizballah had a right to fight, then so too did Salafis. If the army could not protect Lebanese citizens, then he could not ask Salafis to disarm. If Hizballah did not lay its arms down, the whole north would become Salafis, he warned. “The only solution is to put Hizballah’s arms on the table and find a solution; otherwise, the whole north will become Salafists, and I can only sympathize with them,” he concluded.

  In early July 2008 I returned to the Salam Mosque in Tripoli to hear Bilal Barudi speak. People sat smoking a nargila at a nearby cafe. I sat at one of the tables as Barudi’s sermon blasted throughout the area. Sunnis were in danger, he warned; they wanted tawtin, the granting of citizenship to the Palestinians. “We are in a rage now and we should take advantage of that rage,” he said. “We have to keep our sect together. Why are they afraid of tawtin? Because Palestinians are Sunnis. . . . There is a conspiracy against us Sunnis.” Why, he asked, did Armenians in Lebanon have citizenship when their homeland was stable but the Palestinians, who had nothing, were denied it?

  I interviewed Barudi in his office. He was born a sheikh, he told me, explaining that his family had provided sheikhs for seven hundred years. Barudi had met Shaker al-Absi when Absi first arrived. “He started attracting young men with a call to defend Sunnis,” he told me. “I told him you are all going to get killed.” Barudi claimed he had gone to Beirut to meet Hassan Nasrallah and other Shiite officials after the 2006 Samarra shrine attack, but he said that Nasrallah had been very aggressive with him. He also claimed that Iran and Hizballah operatives blew up the shrine, and stressed that two hundred Sunni mosques in Iraq were destroyed on the same day.

  “There is no alternative to Hariri,” he told me. “Hizballah is trying to control us and remove us from the Lebanese equation, but we asked the mufti and Saad al-Hariri to arm the guys on the street, and we know that the guys on the street are capable and ready to fight. There is no solution but the armed solution. This period of time will be dangerous. There is a chance for Al Qaeda to appear in Lebanon. We expect suicide bombers in Lebanon soon.” Barudi described the Islamic Gathering as “a national Islamic resistance against the Iranian plan in Lebanon,” warning that the Shiites would make him don an imama, as a Shiite clerical turban is known.

  I asked Nawaf al-Musawi of Hizballah if he expected Al Qaeda to establish itself in Lebanon. “Saad won’t stay in Lebanon if this happens,” he said. “They will pay the price for this. The Al Qaeda agenda has other priorities. Musbah al-Ahdab will be the first victim.”

  Musawi was feeling triumphant. “We are always thinking about how a threat can become an opportunity,” he told me. “The situation in Lebanon is different than Iraq. The Future Movement doesn’t have a future without an agreement with us. Experience shows that facing us is a losing battle for them. If they threaten us with Salafis, they are committing suicide. Dai al-Islam works for the Saudis, but his environment is an incubator for killer takfiris. We avoid any form of sectarian conflict.”

  Future had a plan to control Beirut, Musawi explained. It was a good plan, he admitted: Future wanted to seize neighborhoods, isolate Dahiyeh from Beirut, surround Shiite neighborhoods, and close the roads around Dahiyeh and the Beqaa. The Future plan was not to occupy opposition areas but to besiege them and have an extended period of street fighting so that the government would tell the UN that Hizballah was an outlaw group. Then there would be an excuse to invite international forces into Lebanon and press the issue of Hizballah’s arms. “We had a quick operation, and we caused this plan to fail,” Musawi said. “As an organization we had good intelligence.” He explained that Hizballah had the centers of power in Beirut surrounded. “We had the head. The Saudis lost on the battlefield.”

  Hizballah and its allies did not seek to change the government by force, nor did it seize control of government officers. Its demand was merely the revocation of the government’s two decisions targeting the resistance. On May 13 the government finally relented. Following the clashes in Beirut, a delegation from the Arab League managed to establish a truce. Roadblocks were removed, the country was reopened, and militias removed their weapons from the streets. Then the parties to the conflict were flown to Qatar, where the national dialogue resumed to resolve the crisis. For the Saudis it was a double humiliation: not only had their proxies been defeated in Lebanon but they had lost their lead diplomatic role to their rival Qatar.

  March 14 proved itself utterly dependent on the Bush administration and the neoconservatives, widely perceived as closer to Israel and more anti-Arab than any other American regime. But Hizballah also suffered a blow to its credibility because it had violated its longstanding commitment never to use its weapons internally. In this sense American and Saudi proxies scored a victory by portraying Hizballah as merely one more sectarian militia in Lebanon, and no longer the national resistance.

  “Backed by Syria and Iran, Hizballah and its allies are killing and injuring innocent citizens and undermining the legitimate authority of the Lebanese government and the institutions of the Lebanese state,” said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “Seeking to protect their state within a state, Hizballah has exploited its allies and demonstrated its contempt for its fellow Lebanese.”

  The May incidents demonstrated the futility of Future adopting any kind of armed program. Hizballah’s brief takeover of Beirut demonstrated how little the Saudis, Americans, and French were willing to do for their local proxies in Lebanon, and in Doha March 14 was forced to conform to most of the opposition’s stipulation.

  Sectarian Hatred Spreads Across the Region

  In Palestine the Americans had pushed Fatah and Hamas to the point of civil war, and then in Lebanon they had also managed to push political tension to armed conflict. In both cases the goal was to discredit overwhelming popular movements, subverting democracy and ignoring the popular will. In Lebanon the Bush administration pressured the ruling coalition not to compromise with the opposition. In December 2009 Nasrallah condemned Arab states—not for being silent, he said, but for their partnership with Israel in the murder of Palestinians. He called on the Egyptian people and army to protest and pressure the Egyptian dictatorship to open the siege on Gaza. It was the first time Hizballah had ever singled out an Arab state. Even during Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, the movement had not gone this far. The next month Nasrallah stated that although Hizballah had not made enemies of Arab states that supported Israel in the 2006 war it would make enemies of those that collaborated against Gaza and the Palestinians. If the Egyptians opened the border, he said, then food, medicine, and even weapons could reach Gaza—and the victory of the resistance in Lebanon could be repeated.

  Sunni Islamists resent Hizballah for monopolizing the struggle with Israel and denying them access to fight the Zionists. The American invasion of Iraq gave them a worthy enemy for the first time since the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. It must have been galling to Al Qaeda leaders to see Hizballa
h regularly praised on Arabic satellite networks while it was condemned, to see that Nasrallah was the most beloved individual in the Arab world while bin Laden and Zawahiri were reviled or ignored. In September 2008 one of the Muslim world’s most prominent Islamic scholars, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who had condemned Al Qaeda in the past, denounced Shiites as heretics and warned that they were trying to penetrate the Sunni world.

  In 2006 a poll of majority-Sunni Egypt revealed that Nasrallah, Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Hamas leader Khalid Meshal were the three most popular figures in the country. But following the execution of Saddam there was a backlash against Shiites. Some Fatah supporters took to labeling Hamas as Shiites because it received help from Iran. Iranian nuclear intransigence has led the Americans to seek an alliance with Sunni Arab dictatorships. The Americans and Israelis campaigned to convince regional governments that Iran was their real enemy. The notion of “moderate Sunni” states was propounded by the Americans, but the people of these states hated their regimes.

  Throughout the region the Iraq War reinvigorated pre-existing sectarianism and provided a new framework for reviving sectarian politics. Since the mid-1970s Kuwait had been the most important center of Shiite radicalism and organization in the Gulf, with movements there reaching out to Shiites in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Kuwait had historic tensions between Shiites and Sunnis, which occasionally flared. Sunnis would gang up on Shiite candidates in parliamentary elections to sabotage their electoral chances. The social contract in which the ruler protected Kuwait’s Shiites from persecution collapsed after the Iran-Iraq War, but after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait it was restored because of the exaggerated role of Shiites resisting the Iraqi occupation. Some said that Shiites hadn’t fled from Kuwait like others because the Saudis wouldn’t let them across the border. Following the American invasion of Iraq tensions increased, fomented by members of the royal family. Given regional fears of a Shiite revival, Kuwait was vulnerable to these machinations.

  After the February 2008 assassination of legendary Hizballah commander Imad Mughniyeh, up to two thousand Kuwaiti Shiites marched in his honor, including two Parliament members. They were met with anger and political maneuvering because any expressions of sympathy for Hizballah, Iraqi Shiites, or Iran were seen as disloyal.

  Like in Kuwait, sectarian tensions in Bahrain had been a regular feature of the political landscape since the 1980s. They were typically initiated by the government but there were also flare-ups initiated by Shiites, who are the majority. Following the American invasion of Iraq the ruling family in Bahrain, like that of Kuwait, was better able to play the sectarian card—warning of a powerful Iran, a Shiite-dominated Iraq, and a fifth column at home.

  In July 2009 Egypt charged twenty-six men with spying for Hizballah and plotting to attack tourists. “Iran, and Iran’s followers, want Egypt to become a maid of honor for the crowned Iranian queen when she enters the Middle East,” Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit declared. The next month Jordan put six of its citizens on trial for fomenting religious sectarianism and promoting Shiism. The Moroccan dictatorship severed its ties with Iran after accusing it of spreading Shiism in Morocco. Yemen accused Hizballah of training Zaydi rebels in the north. The Yemeni dictatorship was in the midst of two civil wars: one against southern secessionists and one against Zaydi tribesmen in the north. Zaydis, who ruled Yemen for centuries, are related to Shiites but are also very close in their beliefs to Yemen’s Sunnis. The Yemeni dictatorship had manipulated its sects, supporting Al Qaeda-like Salafis and veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan when it suited it, and then supporting Zaydis to counterbalance the Salafis. Now it was invoking the phantom Iranian and Hizballah threat as well as an exaggerated Al Qaeda presence to bolster its weak status, with American and Saudi help. Hizballah did admit to supporting Hamas, but it denied getting involved in conflicts between regimes and their people.

  The Shiite belief that succession to the Prophet Muhammad should run through his bloodline through his cousin and son-in-law Ali is viewed by the Saudi clergy and royal family as a threat to their power. Shiites in Saudi Arabia are considered subhuman, an official view that is promoted in state schools; they are not allowed to practice their religion in public. During Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, leading Saudi cleric Sheikh Abdallah bin Jabrin banned support for Hizballah. In December 2008 Saudi security forces fired rubber bullets at crowds of Shiites demonstrating in solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza. In 2009 the imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca attacked Shiite clerics, calling them heretics. Even ordinary Shiites had no excuse for the ignorance and error of their beliefs, he said.

  In Lebanon nothing has been resolved; the crisis has been merely further postponed. The 2009 elections were a slight setback for Hizballah’s Christian allies, but Hizballah lost no popularity, and all its candidates were elected. Although Hizballah’s Christian allies, led by Aoun, received the most votes among Christians, they were defeated thanks to some clever gerrymandering, which allowed Sunni voters to tilt the balance in favor of March 14 in Christian districts. But when the time came to apportion ministries, the Aoun movement received five, while Hariri’s Christian allies received only three.

  In June 2009 Saad Hariri was sworn in as prime minister. The Syrians supported his election. The Saudis, who had begun their rapprochement with Syria earlier that year, pushed Hariri to visit Damascus and reconcile with the man he accused of killing his father. Hariri was now head of a national unity government, with Hizballah as his partner. But although Lebanon’s elites were governing together and even playing football matches, their constituency had not reconciled and remained at odds with one another. Sunnis, in particular, were still feeling humiliated and resentful. After the elections Dai al-Islam, Future’s main Salafi ally, expressed disappointment with the disrespect and neglect they felt Hariri was showing them.

  The country’s volatile sectarian structure remained, as did its underlying social and economic injustices. The sectarian leaders who profit from the system—which forces these injustices to be expressed in sectarian and xenophobic language—remained too. The Palestinians remained without rights or hope. Nahr al-Barid remained under siege. No Palestinians had returned to the original old camp, while up to twenty thousand returned to the new one. The camp was now run by Lebanese army intelligence, which still arrested people and accused them of Fatah al-Islam membership. Humiliations and harassment continued at the checkpoints. Lebanon’s Sunnis remained bitter, though the state did begin taking aggressive action against my friends in Majd al-Anjar. Meanwhile, people waited for the next war with Israel.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A Guest of the Taliban

  ZE TALIBANO MILMAYAM: I AM A GUEST OF THE TALIBAN—IMPORTANT words to remember in Afghanistan. One Saturday afternoon in August 2008, two Taliban commanders met me in Kabul to take me to the Ghazni province, south of Afghanistan’s capital. The plan was to spend a week with various Taliban groups in areas they controlled. A well-connected Afghan friend I trusted had made the introductions. He knew many groups of fighters in Afghanistan, he said, but he would trust my security only with a group who knew that if anything happened to me, then they and their families would be killed. Contact had been made through a well-respected dignitary from Ghazni who connected us with Mullah Abdillah, a midlevel Taliban commander, who then contacted Mullah Baradar, the Taliban defense minister, and approved my trip.

  Mullah Abdillah was a thin man with dark skin and a wispy beard that was long and tapered beneath his chin. He was quick to smile and looked like Bob Marley. He walked with a limp and was bandaged from a recent injury. He had come to Kabul to meet me a week earlier. I explained what I wanted to do. He promised to submit the request to his defense minister, but he was then called away on a mission to the north. I waited impatiently and nervously in my Kabul hotel to receive word about my trip, contemplating the many dangers and trying to ignore the admonitions of friends with more experience working in Afghanistan. Journali
sts had been able to access armed groups in the 1980s and ’90s, but now it was more dangerous. Afghan journalists were killed by the Taliban or arrested by the government if they succeeded in meeting the Taliban. In 2007 an Italian journalist was arrested by the Taliban; he was released at a price, but his driver and fixer were both murdered. In 2008 a British filmmaker, Sean Langan, was held for three months with his fixer, but both were eventually released. David Rohde of the New York Times also spent seven months in the company of the Taliban. Lack of access meant that very little was known or understood about the Taliban, one of the most important groups resisting the U.S. occupation.

  The origins of the Taliban are in the jihad against the Soviets, who invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan backed seven Sunni Islamist parties who fought the Soviets. Many of these mujahideen were extremists, but there was a preference for radical Muslim groups over nationalist groups. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami (Islamic Party) received the most backing. Jalaluddin Haqqani was another commander who received backing from the West. Both were now fighting the Americans and their allies in Afghanistan. The mujahideen were eventually successful, after the Soviets withdrew support for their quislings, and then the West forgot its proxies, who took to fighting among themselves and preying on the population. Into this postwar chaos stepped the Taliban.

  The Taliban came from religious schools set up across the border in Pakistan. These schools provided a free religious education to millions of Afghan refugees and Pakistanis. Many of them helped to spread a radically strict form of Sunni Islam combined with Pashtunwali, the Pashtun tribal and social code of behavior. From a small core of devout religious students with rudimentary military skills, the Taliban grew into a vast state and military movement that controlled all but a fraction of Afghanistan. As the warlords were busy fighting one another and terrorizing Afghans, the Taliban seized their first town in 1993. Three years later they took Kabul. In 1998 the Taliban took the last major city in the north, Mazar-i-Sharif. The Pakistanis abandoned Hekmatyar in favor of the Taliban when they saw how successful the movement was. By 2001 less than 10 percent of Afghanistan remained in the hands of the Tajik Mujahideen, who continued a losing struggle against the Taliban until the Americans came to their rescue.